interests of a freer and more philosophical | call some of the leading features of this nature, interests which ultimately found last period of Genevese influence in Eutheir chief spokesman in Rousseau, and rope. We shall study it best in the lives were to exercise a still more widespread and thoughts of some of the eminent men influence on the modern world than the whom it produced; and when we have ideas of the Calvinistic reform had exer- followed its history up to 1841, a rapid cised over the sixteenth century. Rous- sketch of the men and principles of that seau's connection with Geneva, and the modern Geneva which has now so commany other contributions both in men and pletely effaced and superseded the Geneva theories which the little State made to the of 1814, will enable us to realize still more origins of the French Revolution, com- clearly, by force of contrast, the spirit of bined to give Genevese ideas once more the earlier epoch. a leading part in the general development of Europe. By a strange irony, Geneva herself was one of the first victims of the great movement which she had helped to start. France repaid her, both for Rous seau and for Necker, by the fraudulent act of annexation by which, in 1798, the city passed into the hands of the Directory and became an integral part of the French republic.

For since 1846 the Geneva of history may be said to have ceased to exist. The traditions of the place have lost that assimilative force which for so long enabled the Calvinistic State to mould the foreign elements introduced into her after her own pattern and infuse them with her own spirit. Geneva, in the language of one of her critics, has ceased to be "une grande petite ville," and has become "une petite grande ville;" that is to say, a town like any other, with a rich, self-indulgent upper class, a flourishing middle class, and a turbulent democracy of the ordinary Continental type. Certain traces of the past still remain indeed; the old family houses in the upper town still shelter something of the sobriety, the religious feeling, the science, which made Geneva great. The national Church still maintains its hold on the sentiment of the people, even where it has lost its sway over their belief; and as education spreads, we see the evolution of a certain antiquarian and literary tendency, towards regilding here and there some of the ruined idols of the past. But practically the city of Calvin and Rousseau, and even the city of Sismondi, has ceased to be. Its disappearance gives a special and pathetic interest to the years we are about to describe.

It is with the third period that we are concerned in the present sketch. After the recovery of her political independence in 1814, Geneva, for about a quarter of a century, became again one of the centres of the intellectual life of Europe. All the leading ideas of the Restoration found expression and illustration in her political and social activity, from 1814 to 1840; among her statesmen she counted men of European reputation like Rossi and Sismondi, while her brilliant society formed a meeting-ground for the cultivated classes of England, France, Germany, and Italy. The influence, indeed, of this third period of prosperity has neither been very general nor very lasting. Its brilliancy has not availed to prevent Geneva herself from disavowing the principles on which she was founded, and its social and political speculations have been eclipsed or forgotten in the rapid march of European thought and history. But still, during these twenty or thirty years, Geneva was brought into general and fruitful contact with the countries round her; her thought played a part in European thought which it has now entirely ceased to play, and her upper class, her institutions, her religion, excited an interest far more widespread than any which is now bestowed upon them. The object of this paper is to re-lic was still preserved among a certain

Geneva passed into the possession of the French Republic in March, 1798. A period of national collapse followed. The population declined rapidly; the town for some years wore an air of desertion and decay; while in the place of the Genevese workmen, who had carried their industry into foreign countries, a Savoyard and Catholic proletariat gradually invaded the place. But the ancient life of the repub.

ring of old families, who, during the whole | the great mass of the French Empire, was of the French occupation, contrived to still as ready as it had ever been to assert maintain the Church, the Academy, the its individuality in the face of Europe. A College, and the Sociétés de Bienfaisance, turn of the war withdrew the Austrian within their exclusive direction and con- general and his soldiers from the town, trol, and who kept up between themselves and the provisional government, which and their French masters a social barrier had been in some sort re-constituted to which nothing could break down. It was wards the end of April, threw all its enei. owing to their tenacity and their patriot-gies into obtaining a body of Swiss federal ism that, when the time of deliverance troops to replace their quondam delivercame, the old Geneva was found capable ers. They addressed a demand to the of revival and restoration.

but triumphal arches, from Cologny, where the Swiss landed, to the Hôtel de Ville. Nobody stayed at home, every child was in the streets. It brought the tears into my eyes to see a corps of children ranging from six years old to twelve, -a little troop armed with bows and arrows, and some of them in Mameluke dress, many of them quite small, and as handsome as little cupids, here a company of Lancers, there another of Grenadiers, and three rosy-faced urchins with big sabres on tiny horses, playing colonels. Sisters and mothers were looking on, all in their Sunday best; joy and hope shone on every face, while every bell rang and every cannon thundered.

Meanwhile the serious and practical difficulties of the situation were being grappled with simultaneously by the Genevese deputies to the Congress of Paris and by the envoys of the restored republic at Zurich, then the headquarters of the Helvetic Confederation. The general drift of European policy at the moment was favorable to the Genevese claims. The allies wished to establish a compact and neutralized Switzerland as a barrier between France and her neighbors, and Geneva was necessarily the key of the Swiss western frontier. It was therefore to the interest of the powers, not only to sever Geneva from France, but to see her united in some more solid and permanent fashion than had ever yet been the case, to the main Swiss fabric. But to these geographical and political reasons of the moment Geneva was able to add

others more honorable to her individually. Her unique past, the memory of her struggle for religious freedom, the reputation of her upper class, all these combined to plead her cause and to interest the leading men of the political situation in her claims. On the other hand, the nineteen cantons which had formed the Swiss Confederation since 1803, were not particularly anxious to admit Geneva into their circle. Her history during the eigh teenth century had been one of perpetual political disturbance, and the aristocrats of Berne and Zurich were afraid of the influence which the keen, restless Genevese spirit might exercise on the balance of class power throughout the Confederation; while the Catholic cantons had no wish to see the Protestant element in the Diet reinforced by the representatives of the city of Calvin.

gress, and the provisional government kept up at the same time a pressing correspondence with the Diet. As the inten tions of European policy became plainer, the tone of the Diet towards Geneva grew naturally more complaisant. Guarantees of order and stability were asked for in the shape of a new Genevese constitution; a constitution of a moderately aristocratic type was accordingly drawn up, submitted to popular election, and carried by an enormous majority. Then, when the Helvetic Confederation had first formally settled its own terms of union in a new Federal Pact, the three new cantons of Neuchâtel, Valais, and Geneva were admitted de jure, though not as yet de facto, in September, 1814. During the nine months which followed, the perils of the Hundred Days served to bind Geneva still more closely to the rest of Switzerland. The town was protected by a federal garrison sent thither in March, 1815, and towards the end of April, the deputies of the new canton were at last allowed to take their places in the Diet. Four months afterwards, when Europe had been finally delivered from Napoleon, the new Switzerland celebrated her birthday in the cathedral of Zurich. On the 9th of August, 1815, every Swiss deputy took the following oath of allegiance to their common country:

We swear to observe the alliance of the

Confederation loyally and perpetually, and to sacrifice thereto if necessary our bodies and all the means in our power the prosperity and our blood and our possessions; to assure by advantage of our country and of each particular canton, and to avoid all that might harm either; to live amongst ourselves as brothers and confederates in good as in evil fortune; and to accomplish all that duty and honor require from faithful allies.

Such was the solemn compact which symbolized the resurrection of Switzerland from the state of partial servitude to which the Napoleonic Empire had reduced her. To Geneva, her entry into the Confederation was a source of unmixed satisfaction. For centuries she had been the protected ally of Berne or Fribourg. She was now their political equal, and a future of peaceful and regular development seemed assured to her. The However, step by step, the negotiations little town of thirty thousand inhabitants, were carried forward. Geneva, hoping with a yearly income of about a million thereby to make herself more acceptable francs, had excited all through the crisis to the Confederation, endeavored, for the of the Napoleonic downfall the interest of most part unsuccessfully, to obtain an in-cultivated men all over Europe, and the crease of territory from the allies in con- history of the twenty-five years which fol

lowed the restoration of the republic was to provide abundant justification for this widespread sympathy. Genevese society had never been so brilliant, and Genevese ideas during this quarter of a century had a vogue and currency in Europe which is now hard to realize. If in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Geneva had been the metropolis of the Reformation, Occupying within the limits of Protestantism a position analogous to that of Rome itself, and in the eighteenth century, a hotbed of political theory - after 1814 the dream of her leading men was to make of her a pattern State, to use her as a laboratory of constitutional and social experiment. The problems of representative government in its different degrees and proportions, the eternal difficulty of how to combine the maximum of individual liberty with the maximum of public welfare, the value of the utilitarian theory as applied to the different branches of modern life, the secrets of economical progress, and the relation of the State towards the child it has to educate and the criminal it is forced to punish, these were the kind of subjects which fed the flame of Genevese discussion during the active and fruitful years which followed the restoration of the republic.

families, who, after a last brilliant period of rule, were to be finally swept out of power by James Fazy and the Radical Revolution of 1846. The Genevese aristocracy had grave weaknesses and defects, which became more and more apparent as the older men who had helped to bring about the Restoration died off, and their sons, who had been brought up under the cramping influences of the French period, attempted to take their places. But during these first remarkable years all that met the eye was a Genevese upper class, as intelligent as it was rich and well bred, numbering among its ranks critics, historians, philanthropists, jurists, and men of science, and keeping up incessant communication with every intellectual centre in Europe.

The social atmosphere of Geneva indeed was almost oppressively intellectual. The modern reader at any rate is roused to an impulse of half-sarcastic revolt when, in the course of one of Charles de Bonstetten's admiring descriptions of the life of those days, he comes across the sentence: "Here one can never feel a moment's emptiness; there are so many lectures to be attended!" One must remember, however, that the idea which the words call up is characteristic of the whole The government, indeed, was aristo- European situation. The classes which cratic in temper and in composition, hav- had been driven out of power by the Revoing the fear of the Holy Alliance perpetu- lution, had everywhere returned to power; ally before its eyes, and holding literature but nothing could undo the effects on the and the press under a censorship more or European mind of the stormy period less strict, according to the political ne- which had just closed; it was still necescessities of the day. Sismondi, fresh sary, even in those countries where the from his efforts to help Napoleon in the aristocratic reaction was strongest, to gov. Hundred Days, not as Napoleon, indeed, ern by the help of ideas, as well as by the but as the only possible representative of help of physical force, and everywhere liberal ideas in the face of a reactionary men were eager to theorize, to formulate Europe, threw himself into opposition to the principles of the new epoch, and to the party which 1814 had brought to the reconcile, here in a more Conservative, front, and with the help of Rossi, Du- there in a more Liberal sense, the requiremont, and others, succeeded ultimately in ments of order with the requirements of indoctrinating Genevese public life with liberty. The lecturing attitude, the pose that tone of moderate liberalism which of the doctrinaire, came naturally to the prevailed in it from 1825 to 1846. A Lib- thinkers and politicians of the time. In eral opposition was needed, for in 1815 France, this political doctrinairism came class distinctions were for the moment finally into power with Louis Philippe ; revived with fresh strength. The air but in the little republic of Geneva it seemed to be still hot with the passions found full expression and free play from of the eighteenth century, and although the beginning of the Restoration period. the representatives and the natives, to"A meeting-point of nations," writes the use the eighteenth-century names for the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, had now, thanks to the Revolution and the Constitution of 1814, obtained a considerable share of political power, yet the real government of the State had fallen once more into the hands of those old aristocratic

Swiss biographer of Bonstetten, speaking of Geneva in 1815, "a point of contact for men and minds of the most different type, the town presented a faithful although a softened reflection of all the new tendencies awakened by the Restoration throughout Europe;" and one of the most